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- Опубліковано 27 жов 2022
- Season 1 Episode 18 - The team at Tolkien Collector's Guide sit down to talk with Dr. Tom Shippey about his new book, "Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings" and lots of related Tolkien topics - a very wide ranging conversation from an expert in these fields!
2:00 Tolkien's influence on Beowulf scholarship
5:03 Beowulfian Archeology
8:30 Conversation about taking away the mead halls
11:15 Tolkien on Beowulf as fantasy and historical document
16:00 We've got a date in Beowulf!
20:30 Climate Change affecting cultural trauma for Scandinavia
22:50 Mathoms
28:00 Tolkien was a niggler on his Beowulf work, fun Tolkien anecdote, and Shippey explains Finn and Hengest.
32:38 Tolkien's theory on Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment
36:55 Pearl Harbor of the Dark Ages
41:45 Young Tolkien vs Old Tolkien
46:20 Beowulf as two separate and 'removed from the past' poems
53:30 Swedes and Danes were the winners of the old Beowulf world
55:30 What does the name 'Beowulf' mean?
1:00:35 Where can you find Beowulf in LOTR?
1:03:00 Shippey discusses the LOTR Scheme
1:05:50 Mentions of Shippey's help for researching his book
1:10:00 Shippey on Tolkien's posthumous works and other
speculations on Tolkien and old Scandinavia
1:13:10 Best Translation of Beowulf?
1:17:40 What's in Dr. Shippey's Tolkien collection?
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I love Tom Shippey and it's good to see him and hear him doing so well. Thanks for this! On to read the book.
A very interesting discussion! Dr. Shippey is an incredible resource, and always provides such amazing insights and perspectives on Tolkien scholarship. Thanks for posting!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Dr Shippey is a witty and inimitable treasure-trove of scholarship and bookcræft. Love this discussion!
The reference to Lewis’ dragon-poem means I now have to check when he wrote that the books favoured by pre-dragon Eustace Scrubb dealt with drains and imports but were very poor on dragons…
Wonderful interview, gents! Loved it!
Being Danish makes this even better. I was born a few kilometres from Lejre, read Beowulf at university in Oxford (Magdalen College!), then read more literature at University of York, while my family moved to Jutland, to a small farmstead a stone’s throw from the old Viking capital of Ribe. I agree with Dr Shipton that York beats any of the southern Anglo Saxon wealds any day.
Amazon's prices do not necessarily reflect any market reality or producer's intentions. They tailor prices to what customers have spent before and an algorthmic guess about what they may be prepared to pay in the future.
"Viking Age Public Relations" HA! 🙂
Not two, but three early 20th century fantasy novels with dragons. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922.
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Has anyone ever thought of translating Beowulf With Nordic references? What I mean is this and I’m sure it will be considered foolish because of how much you’d have to change, but I think if that was all mentioned and referenced in the introduction it could be handled well.
Instead of the monsters being the descendants of Cain, have the be the offspring of Loki, Loki’s mother of course would be a Jotunn and the dragon would still be a dragon. Basically change all the Christian parts to Norse things because I don’t think anyone in the story was a Christian. But a Christian copied it down and obviously changed it.
Is the idea of making it solely Nordic in culture and religion stupid and foolish? To mention Woden/Odin? I just finished the audio book yesterday after a few years of not reading it and I forgot all the Christian stuff that’s in the story that feels completely out of place.
I'm not aware of a re-writing of Beowulf in the framework you have described, but that shouldn't stop you (or somemone) from taking a shot at it!
I don't necessarily agree that "a Christian copied it down", I would probably phrase that as "a Christian, writing to a Christian audience, used a 300+ year old oral legend as a framework for the story he wanted to tell"
@@TolkienGuide yes, I definitely agree with that definition of how it was written over how I phrased it.
Thanks for the words of encouragement! I’ll continue to work on my project.
Not to sound discouraging, but I'd argue that an authentic Norse (technically Swedish) retelling of Beowulf would have to differ pretty drastically. I don't know much about the subject, but I do suspect the Christian poet invented the Grendel character entirely. As Dr Shippey points out, Beowulf's battle against Grendel and Grendel's mother is almost identical to "the Bear's Son Tale", which is a category of folktales which might be older than Norse mythology itself.
My suspicion is, that Beowulf and the history of the Geats was remembered by Jutish families in Kent, and maybe have been considered an ancestor some of them. The Beowulf Poet might have been commissioned to write an epic poem about this ancestor, and took elements from either Celtic or Continental folklore to construct the monster slaying episodes, and craft a morality tale for the warrior-aristocracy.
Point is, if you did craft an authentically "pagan" rewrite of Beowulf, you should feel free to change the story pretty wildly. A Norse version would probably have more focus on the grim future of Hrothgar's and Beowulf's kingdoms, that the Christian poet only alludes to. Ironically, the animated Robert Zemeckis film is probably close to what a pagan version of the story would look like.
@@mistersharpe4375 don’t worry about being discouraging. The translation I am using for my retelling of Beowulf is Tolkien’s. It’s not as hard as I thought it was going to be but the writing is slow, I’m an eighth of the way through the story as of now. Even though the story is written in Old English I use Old Norse words because I take the lessons taught by Jackson Crawford on his Patreon and according to him (and others he teaches about) the Danes and Geats would have spoken a “proto Norse” language.
For an example of something in my translation I change Grendel from being a descendant of Cain to a child of Loki. There’s a part talking about the ocean and the waves so I changed that to Aegir and his daughters (the different kinds of waves) in the beginning, instead of God sending a savior I have Oðin send a hero. When God gives gifts to Hrothgar of success I change this to Oðin of course and because the gifts Oðin will give a man come with a duality that eventually gets them killed or ruined in one way or another.
When you compare the story of Beowulf to that of the Old Testament Hrothgar and the Scyldings never do anything to encourage the wrath of God, they are never given a commandment to follow that they fail and are later punished for. Grendel isn’t described as anything other than being evil but only for being a descendant of Cain. In that paragraph Elves are included in the descendants of Cain and as such are evil. Tolkien changed that and it’s one of the things I like about his translation because the original author of Beowulf either did it on purpose to make Elves evil or he didn’t know that Elves are the dead male ancestors of humans in the Norse religion, with Disa being the female of this. They can be malevolent or benevolent and it depends on if you are honoring them or not.
In my opinion Beowulf rings true to many of the Norse tales in the fact that Grendel comes out of nowhere and just hates humans much like the Jotunn for no reason. If they have a reason it must be because Oðin and his brothers killed Ymir and used his body to make the world humans live on, and since He and his brothers made us out of trees we are made from a body part of Ymir (some renditions of the story say they used his hair and eyebrows to make the trees) and I’ve always assumed that make the other Jotunn angry.
In every Old Testament story God is punishing people in a story like Beowulf like when God lets his people be conquered because they stopped worshipping him and fall to worshipping false gods. These is never a reason given like this in Beowulf not even for the amazing hall of Heorot which wouldn’t really make sense because Hrothgar uses it to have celebrations for his people and gives them gifts of wealth and shares his treasure. Which is something Oðin would want a good king to do.
All in all I see what you are saying but when I read what I have written so far the story just makes way more sense and sounds like just another Norse saga. I can’t wait to finish it and hopefully get it published with my preface explaining why I wanted to write it and my index that shows all the things I changed and what they were in Tolkien’s translation and the original.
Furthermore I completely disagree with you on your take about the animated movie being a good “Norse” take on the story the movie makes Beowulf a liar when he tells the story of swimming against Breca and ultimately lost because he fought 9 sea serpents. And Unferth isn’t drunk in the poem when he asked about it nor is he contesting the story in anyway, he just asks if Beowulf is that same guy but in the movie Wiglaf makes a comment about it being only 7 sea serpents last time he told the story, and Beowulf keeps to himself the fact that he was saved by a mermaid from drowning and that doesn’t happen in the book. Nor is there any chance of Beowulf sleeping with Grendel’s mother, he definitely only want to kill her like Thor wants to smash a Jotunn with his hammer. The animated changes many things to destroy the moral character of Beowulf. If you want to see a good Beowulf movie watch the one with Gerald Butler.
The "Names in Beowulf" article by Shippey is available here: www.academia.edu/36579671/Names_in_Beowulf_and_Anglo_Saxon_England
Thanks! Alas for dumbing-down editorial interventions… Onomastic Redundancy is quite a lovely phrase.